simple, direct language: "All morons hate it when you call them a moron."

colloquial (slang): calls homosexuals "flits"

lots of repetition: "phonies"

cussing: "Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell."

many digressions: "It's no fun to be yellow. Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. I think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves."

Narration: Holden is unreliable narrator

conditional opening: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me

non-autobioghical

anti-Freudian (don’t psycho-analyze Holden’s lousy childhood)

episodic plot (like The Odyssey, Huck Finn)

Anti-European: “…and all that David Copperfield kind of crap” (Dickens); most European characters define themselves in context of family; Holden is saying that he doesn’t define himself with others or the past (birth of the American rebel)

Use of Language

Anaphora: (repetition at beginning of sentence) : “It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomch.”

Metaphor: “Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them”